As to be expected, the book is tutorial in structure and many demonstrations for creating Validation Rules, writing ShapeSheet formulae etc. The example code for these are all included and therefore is great for those who ‘learn by doing’ making the practical and immediately deployable examples very useful.

The recent presentation (with embeded audio) given by Keith Swenson at the 2009 Process.gov conference in Washinton DC on June 19, explains how a process model may or may not change over its lifetime i.e. static business model to execution in a BPMS and what the various considerations and trade offs are.

Keith identifies 3 kinds of change that a process may undergo:

Business Process Enactment: – the business process as it moves from the beginning to the end of handling a single case. The process definition does not normally change here, only the process instance or context that records the state of a particular case changes.

Business Process Lifecycle: – these are the changes that a business process goes through from initial concept, to modeling, to integration, and finally to deployment into an enactment environment.

Business Process Improvement: – the change to a business process that occurs over time through repeated use of the business process lifecycle followed by analysis of how well that version of the business process worked.

I was recently asked by a customer if I know of any free process modeling and automation tools. This got me thinking of how many vendors provide a free edition of their software for unlimited use i.e. no trial basis or try before you buy editions. After some research I came up with the following short list.

I have not evaluated each application so could not comment on their strengths and weaknesses but would be interested to hear about other free BPM and/or Enterprise Architecture tools so I can add them to my resource list.